Douglas Valentine’sThe Phoenix Program is vital for understanding the history of terrorism and its role in political warfare. Few other historical accounts provide as much detail on how the U.S. government and the CIA began to use programs for counterterrorism to implement political policy through secretive, coldblooded actions. Understanding such history is critical to making sense of what is happening in our world today.

Who was responsible for the crimes of 9/11? Osama bin Laden and nineteen, young Islamic terrorists? Or is there evidence pointing towards other suspects who should be investigated? To discuss this question, we are joined by Kevin Ryan, author of the book Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects, and co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

Drawing upon a decade of investigation, Kevin Ryan traces an intricate web of interconnections between key individuals, institutions and businesses, and reveals an alternative set of 9/11 suspects, each with the "means, motive and opportunity" possibly to have played their part in the crimes of 9/11.

The Kuwaiti-American Corporation (KuwAm), parent company of World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec, had some interesting links to royalty in both Iran and Kuwait. Some of the company’s directors also had connections to U.S. intelligence agencies and at least one was associated with the CIA-funded terrorist financing network that included BCCI. Through these links we can see that the origins of the War on Terror are related to the origins of the first Gulf War, and to a private network of covert operatives that stretches back for generations.

After the 1993 bombing, a company called Stratesec was responsible for the overall integration of the new WTC security system. In the few years leading up to 9/11, Stratesec also had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes that were destroyed on 9/11, and Dulles Airport where American Airlines Flight 77 took off.

Stratesec’s board of directors included Marvin Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, and Wirt Dexter Walker III, a distant relative of the Bush brothers.[1] Marvin Bush joined the board of Stratesec after meeting members of the Al Sabah family on a trip to Kuwait with his father in April 1993. During this trip, the Kuwaiti royals displayed enormous gratitude to the elder Bush for having saved their country from Saddam Hussein only two years earlier.

But the Bush-Kuwaiti connection went back much farther, to 1959, when the Kuwaitis helped to fund Bush’s start-up company, Zapata Off-Shore. As a CIA business asset during this time, Bush and his company worked directly with the anti-Castro Cuban groups in Miami before and after the Bay of Pigs invasion.[2]

The author is indebted to the good people at History Commons for their “Complete 9/11 Timeline.” If a reference is not evident below, it can probably be found there.

A recent interview with former “Counterterrorism Czar,” Richard Clarke, is making a splash in the alternative media.[1] In this interview, Clarke speculates about CIA malfeasance related to the pre-9/11 monitoring of two alleged September 11 hijackers. This interview is somewhat interesting due to Clarke’s vague suggestion that the CIA had courted 9/11 suspects as sources, but it is far more interesting for what was not said with regard to Clarke’s personal history and associations.

Law firms representing victims of the 9/11 attacks in an ongoing legal dispute with wealthy Saudis suspected of financing al-Qaeda have recently turned their attention to two individuals with unique ties to the U.S. government.

Lawyers for victims of the attacks, as well as insurance companies of property owners in New York, have filed a motion of discovery in federal district court in Manhattan targeting the Saudi-owned National Commercial Bank (NCB) and two of its former executives, Khalid bin Mahfouz and Yassin al-Qadi.

Both Mahfouz and al-Qadi have a murky history that includes alleged ties to the CIA, the White House, the Bush family, al-Qaeda, and organized crime on a global scale.

New entries this week cover a wide variety of topics. Regarding the 9/11 Commission, members and staff were dismayed by Laurie Mylroie's Iraq-al-Qaeda potboiler, as was a CIA expert who had the misfortune to sit on the same panel as Mylroie, and the Jersey Girls. Staffers were appalled by executive director Philip Zelikow's rewriting of a staff statement to imply Iraqi connections to al-Qaeda, and forced him to back down.

(I finally finished a book that has been on my "to-read" list for a couple of years now, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI by Jonathan Beatty and S.C. Gwynne. I highly recommend picking up a copy, because the information in the book is still not generally known, particularly the ways in which intelligence agencies, terrorists, and drug traffickers all belly up to the same bank to launder their money. As time rolls on, I suspect that we will see evidence that a BCCI paradigm was part of 9/11, including the use of a Black Network that is international in nature, and staffed by some very ruthless and pathological individuals. Octopus-like in effect, designed to cover tracks and simultaneously produce nationalist red-herrings that keep people treading water with their research, but not really getting anywhere... On that note, please check out this great blog entry over at DemocraticUnderground by DU user, leveymg... -rep.)

You may have heard that it takes a Clinton to punish a Bush for crimes of state. Not likely. The simple, undeniable fact is that Bill Clinton was presented the opportunity to prosecute former Bush Administration officials when he took office in 1993, but he refused to fully pursue his predecessors in the Oval Office who had been responsible for the illegal Iran-Contra operation, the S&L rip-off, and the BCCI scandals.

Instead, Clinton’s presidency was tainted by its own intelligence and campaign finance scandals – massive espionage and influence buying operations -- featuring much of the same supporting cast of foreign intelligence agencies, corrupt U.S. middlemen, and international bankers who had been at the center of the Reagan-Bush scandals.

No Clinton era official or those of two earlier Administrations were ever fully prosecuted and jailed for their role in crimes involving the CIA and BCCI, or for related crimes that have afflicted the Bush 41 and Clinton presidencies. Investigations have been repeatedly sidetracked, ignored, or when prosecutions actually occurred, top officials have been pardoned. These crimes, along with new and more lethal variations on them, carried over into the Bush 43 Administration.

Now, we are being asked to believe that Hillary Clinton is the best choice among Democratic candidates to clean house and punish the many and varied crimes of state committed by Bush-Cheney. Not bloody likely...

I just came over this one hour documentary at YouTube. It has some interesting interviews (see full list of persons below). Zbigniew Brzezinski gets eight minutes on his role in Afghanistan in the late 1970s.

Description
OUR OWN PRIVATE BIN LADEN is a film about understanding the creation of the persona of Osama bin Laden as a phenomenon of the interplay between history, politics, global economics and the media. The film highlights the historical background that led to the fatal link between post-Cold War politics and the emergence of new forms of terrorism that succeeded in establishing their own economy. It traces the connection between privatization, deregulation and free market and the globalization of terrorism.
OUR OWN PRIVATE BIN LADEN examines the complicity between economic structures of "terror" and "the war on terror," their interdependencies, and the creation of the Bin Laden industry as a consequence.

The film explains why the world after September 11, 2001 is less the result of a stray act of terror but the consequence of a series of fatal decisions made from 1945 onwards.

Named Best Foreign Documentary and Best Film of the Festival at the inaugural European Independent Film Festival in Paris, Samira Goetschel's consuming work achieves the brilliance of Michael Moore with a great degree of dignity and restraint. By sheer determination, she collected a trove of high-caliber interviews with eminent investigative journalists and political figures such as Cold War-era CIA director Stansfield Turner, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pakistani ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto and the world's leading "public intellectual” Noam Chomsky.

The title is great, the essay not quite as interesting. Still, this is getting coverage at many progressive news sites, such as Alternet. The overlapping funding of the Bush family and Osama Bin a Patsy is indeed worth looking into.

How the Bush family's private connection to a dirty offshore bank is the only link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The following chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's new book "A Game as Old as Empire," just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco).

Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

At Sander Hicks' VOX Pop bookstore/cafe this Saturday, impeccable BCCI researcher Lucy Komisar will be promoting the new book, "A Game as Old As Empire" in which she has a chapter;

Saturday 3/31 @ Vox Pop, 5-9 PM, FREE:

Dinner special for only $9! Your choice of Turkey/Bison/Veggie Burger with Beer or Wine, voxpopnet.net/food.html, voxpopnet.net/beerwine.html

5-7 PM: James Henry and Lucy Komisar present A Game As Old As Empire

John Perkins's controversial exposé, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, came out of nowhere in late 2004 to become an international word-of-mouth sensation. Now Perkins is joined by a dozen contributors-journalists, investigators, activists, and even other economic hit men in A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption.

Dave Emory: ...the current seated President, George W. Bush, is not at all separate from the BCCI milieu ... this isn't something that's "long ago and far away".

Lucy Komisar: No... BCCI has been very good to the current Bush's business interests... in 1979 and 80 it helped finance his oil company which was called Arbusto Energy. The money came through a man named Bath who was in business, and one might think he was moving the money of Mr. Bin Mahfouz. That money turned out to be very useful for George Bush, when Harken Energy, (which absorbed Arbusto), got in money trouble in 1987, it got $25 million in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland, and as part of that deal, a seat on the board was given to a Harken shareholder Sheikh Abdullah Taha Baksh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz ...

The money comes from CIA, it goes through BCCI, in accounts that nobody knows about, that nobody can follow, and then money from the big shareholders of BCCI comes back to George Bush.